A Parents' Guide to Generation I

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Comcast Trying to Close Digitial Divide

Over the past few months, the digital divide and online education have been a hot topic of conversation in Washington. President Obama introduced the ConnectED Program, which has a goal to connect 99 percent of our country’s students to true high-speed Internet service within the next five years, and F.C.C. Chairman Tom Wheeler announced a down payment on this goal with plans to invest an additional $2 billion over the next two years to support broadband networks in schools and libraries.

At Comcast, closing the digital divide has been one of our most important Community Investment priorities for years. Since 2011, we have invested more than $165 million in cash and in-kind support to fund digital literacy initiatives nationally, and in May 2011, we announced Internet Essentials, the nation’s largest and most comprehensive broadband adoption program.

Today, we are proud to join the President’s call to action with the extension of Internet Essentials indefinitely. The program began as a voluntary three-year commitment that we offered during the regulatory review of Comcast’s acquisition of NBCUniversal. Now, it is much more than we ever thought it would be, and the fact is, the program has become a key part of who we are and what we do.

In just two and a half years, more than 1.2 million Americans, or 300,000 families, have been connected to the power of the Internet at home through Internet Essentials. We’ve sold more than 23,000 low-cost computers, and, with our community partners, we have provided support for free digital literacy training for more than 1.6 million people.